Tempest
by prouvaires
Summary: -she's an impossibly pretty kind of broken.- LilyTeddy.


He knows all the little things about her that no-one else does. He's watched her grow up from a tiny baby to a fiery, beautiful woman and he can't remember a time when he didn't love her. (of course at first it was just the usual family love – he can't remember when the line blurred.)

He was eleven when she was born (eleven years too old). He saw her when they brought her home from the hospital, red and screaming and a tuft of hair on the top of her head that was already the colour of flames. That was the main reason for the nickname he gave her. Harry and Ginny argued for the first month of her life about her name, so he had to come up with something to call her in the meantime. He called her Fire, because of her hair. Harry won the argument (of course he did) and she became Lily Luna Potter, but she was still little Fire to him.

Now he's twenty-seven years old and she's sixteen years young and she's still Fire (but it's not just her hair any more, it's everything about her). He's never called her Lily, not once, because his silly nickname for her is the only thing about her that's all his, the one part of her that no-one can steal from him.

He sort of falls apart when he sees the way she looks at Scorpius Malfoy, the dark and dangerous pure-blood. His heart breaks for himself and the knowledge that she's in love with someone else, and for her because Scorpius is her cousin Rose's boyfriend and she can't ever have him (and since the beginning her hurt was his hurt).

She runs to him when Scorpius scorns her, when her brothers tease her, when her parents are angry with her. He has a room in their home because he's there so often, and his door will bang open and she'll be across the room and into his arms before he has time to say her name. (her name is his favourite word in the whole world.)

She sobs into his chest, needing the comfort, choking his name out through the tears. "Teddy," she whispers over and over, and he strokes her flame-hair and wipes her cheeks and suppresses the shivers that he gets whenever her lips shape themselves around the sound of his name.

(And just having her close makes everything else disappear so there's just him and her and her sadness and his silence).

He knows everything she doesn't want anyone to know.

To everyone else, she's the famous Harry Potter's daughter. She has this killer body and these eyes that sparkle like she knows a secret nobody else does and this heart-stealing smile that makes every single man's pulse race when she turns it on him.

What he understands about her is that her body is fantastic because her image is the one thing about her life she can control; that her eyes only sparkle because the spotlight she's living her life in catches the reflection of her unshed tears; and that her smile is breathtaking because if she smiles through life people ask her less questions. (and she doesn't like questions because they make her think about the mess she's in.)

She's an impossibly pretty kind of broken.

He's in his room at their house one night, lying upside-down on his bed and staring at the stars out of the window. He's toying absently with his wand, considering casting a silencing spell. He can hear the laughter from downstairs and right now he just wants to be miserable (it's harder when there's audible happiness so close to him).

He can identify each voice as it rises and falls with the conversation – there's Harry, Ginny, Hermione, Hugo, Rose, James, Albus, Ron, Scorpius. He knows Lily's down there, but he can't hear her at all and so he knows that she's sitting by herself in a corner, too wrapped up in Scorpius to get involved.

He sighs and shuts his eyes to wish on a random star, and when he opens them his hair has flushed the dark shade of blue that reflects his melancholy mood. He sighs again, and he's about to cast the spell when silence descends anyway and he holds his breath, waiting.

He knows someone's said something that stepped over the line, and he's waiting for pounding footsteps up the stairs and for his door to bang open. (Because it's always Lily that's the focal point.)

But the footsteps never come, and he hears the front door bang. He's out of his room and down the stairs in a second, staring round at the sitting room.

"Where's Lily?" he demands. (He feels stupid calling her Fire in front of her family.)

"She ran out," Albus explains solemnly from behind his overlong fringe. "James was mean."

"Shut up," James snaps, glaring at his brother. "I just said she ought to stop mooning over Scorp. It's not my fault she can't take a joke."

The room laughs nervously, and Teddy has to take a deep breath to refrain from hitting James.

"She'll be back, don't worry," Ginny says softly to him as the others return to the game they were playing before, and he turns to her, his hair a savage shade of red.

"How do you know that?" he growls, but regrets it immediately when her face falls just a little. "I'm sorry, Ginny," he says tiredly, leaning against the doorpost. "I guess everything's just getting too much for me."

She smiles kindly (and he sort of hates how understanding she is).

"Don't worry," she tells him, patting his arm. "I know my daughter."

He kind of wants to scream that she doesn't, that no-one knows Lily apart from him. Her parents don't know that she lost her virginity aged fifteen to some guy in Ravenclaw just to prove something no-one understood (not even her), that she tried cutting herself once but couldn't comprehend how making herself hurt more would make her feel better, that she's afraid of the dark and of being alone and of snakes and storms and spiders.

He sits on the edge of the sofa, tense, not a part of the happy family atmosphere. His hair is back to its usual brown but his eyes are swimming with flecks of orange, betraying his anxiety for the girl he loves.

One hour passes, then another, and he starts pacing. (he doesn't understand why no-one else is worried).

"Are you sure – " he begins, but Harry cuts him off.

"We live in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere," he points out. "There's nothing that could harm her."

Teddy has never wanted to hit his godfather before, but he does in that moment. He resumes pacing, and then the lightening flashes outside and the rain is suddenly pounding against the asphalt of the road outside as the clouds empty themselves (and he can only imagine how terrified she is in that moment).

He's out of the door in seconds, and to their credit the rest of the family is behind him almost instantly, wands lit, calling into the encroaching darkness.

"Lily!" they shout into the storm. He goes in the opposite direction to the rest of them, and as he moves further away from the house the silence surges softly back to him.

He finds her (of course he does).

She's curled up in the ruins of her grandparents' house, in the one corner that wasn't destroyed by the curse that changed the course of history. He drops his wand into the mud and pulls her close.

She clings to him, and she's shaking and crying and she can't breathe properly. (and he's _break-break_-breaking just seeing her like this – she's never lost control so utterly before).

"It's okay, you're safe," he insists over the screaming of the storm. The thunder crashes overhead (oh, _God_) and she buries her face in his neck.

"Please, Teddy," she murmurs, and her whisper is louder than the howling wind. "I need to forget everything," she tells him as she unbuttons his shirt and then her own. "Please, make me forget," she begs as she pulls his trousers off. And he knows he shouldn't, knows he should pull away and dress them both and carry her back to the house and the safety of her family, but she's so cold against his bare skin that his arms go round her to warm her up and she reaches and pulls him into her, and he touches heaven.

"You know we shouldn't, Fire," he gasps, and she nods.

"I know," she confirms, and then kisses him. Her hair is tangled in the mud, and her cold hands are roaming all over him.

"I love you," he moans into her ear, and she smiles the smile she saves just for him, that's not hiding anything. (he doesn't see it often).

"I love you too," she tells him, and he wishes he could believe her.

When they're finished the storm is still shrieking, but he's grateful because what he's just done is lost in the wildness of the tempest, and he can try to go back to pretending he's a good person, pretending he can survive without her love.

"You don't love me," he informs her as, shivering, he helps her back into her drenched clothes. She shuts her eyes as her tears mix with the rain.

"If it wasn't for Scorpius, I could," she admits. "I do love you, but I just love him more. I know it's hopeless, but I just can't help it."

He nods, and kisses her frozen fingertips. "I know."

"I'm sorry," she whispers, and he pulls her to her feet. She pitches forward, almost falling, and he catches her and swings her easily into his arms. Her arms cling around his neck and she reaches to kiss him on the cheek, her lips like ice against his stubble.

"It's okay," he lies as he trudges forward, his wand tucked into his back pocket so no light shines forward. He lies because he can't be without her and her vitality and he's scared to leave her alone because of what she might do to herself.

"I'm too old for you anyway," he comments after a long silence, and he can feel her lips curve up into a smile against his neck.

"You're never too old for a happy-ever-after," she says, and as their gazes meet he sees the little girl she was, the future she's offering him, the love she has for him that's just not enough.

"Well, I'm just about old enough for a happy-never-after," he mutters, and breaks the eye-contact. "I won't be with you while you're in love with Scorpius," he declares. "I can't survive that."

Her lip trembles, and he automatically clutches her tighter. "I'm not going to leave you," he promises, and she reaches up and twines her fingers in his hair, that's betrayed him by turning dark blue. "But I can't be more than your friend until you're over him."

She blinks sadly, and her eyes are downcast. "I'm sorry," she says again.

"It's not your fault," he tells her (more lies). "But whenever you're ready to move on, I'm here. I'll always be here."

"I don't know how I got so lucky to have you," she announces, and he wants to cry so he smiles instead, like she always does (it's funny because she always used to copy _his_ habits).

They near the house and she starts shivering again, but her family rush out and greet them, pulling her away from him. Scorpius is hovering in the background, and Teddy grabs Albus out of the melee.

"Al, truthfully, was James' comment all that set it off?"

Albus hangs his head. "Well, Scorp and I had kind of been joining in before. I said that she looked down, and Scorp did that hair-flick thing he does and kissed Rose, then said that he wondered why. Then Lils looked mad, and James said … well, you know the rest."

Teddy nods and lets Albus go. "Thanks, kid." Albus grins tentatively and hurries back into the house. Teddy lets the family precede him in, and then yanks on the back of Scorpius' jacket to pull the younger boy outside into the rain again. (It's time someone else was hurting.)

"You're such an asshole," Teddy tells him, and then punches him in the face. Scorpius goes down yelling, and Rose rushes outside, swearing at Teddy and screaming for her parents and crying and trying to stop the flow of blood from her boyfriend's nose.

"Teddy, you'd better – " Ginny starts to warn him, but his wand's already out and he's feeling his way into the blackness. (And not for the first time he realises how much he'd like to stay in the space between spaces.)

He arrives back on his flat doorstep, and opens the door. It's lonely inside – it has been since he told Victoire it wasn't fair to her to be with her while he was in love with someone else. He steps into the shower fully clothed and just stands for a while, still feeling his little Fire against his skin. He gets out of the shower to towel himself dry, and after he's locked up he gets into a pair of tracksuit bottoms and climbs into his (too empty) bed.

Welcome to my happy-never-after, he thinks to himself as he switches the light off.

He's woken up in the middle of the night by someone climbing into bed with him. He catches a flash of red hair, but he wasn't worried anyway because there's only one person that can get past his wards. She's the last (only) person he wants to see, and when she cuddles up next to him, her ice-block feet pressed against his warm legs, he goes to sleep pretending to himself that she's here not because he's a good kind of glue to hold her together but because she's decided to forget Scorpius and the heartbreak that he walks hand-in-hand with.

(It turns out you're never too old for make-believe).


End file.
